Bud Lite and Bud have gone from defining Americana to dying as brands in one year. Why? A misbegotten marketing campaign led by a popular transgender Youtuber.
The wipeout is extraordinary:
There is a vital lesson in this for the Albanese Government.
New Zealand Labor did not learn it and just got cleaned out at the general election:
The party was punished by voters who believed it had spent years in government focusing on peripheral issues as cost-of-living pressures mounted, with right-wing minor parties railing against the Maori representation measures Ardern championed in office.
“People were thinking ‘I can’t afford to pay for my groceries, why are you focused on these pet projects?’,” one former Labour staffer says.
In what could be an early warning for the Albanese government dealing with the wash-up of an unsuccessful Voice referendum, New Zealand Labour’s perceived focus on social issues – including Maori co-governance reforms – was weaponised against it by parties to its right.
The lesson is that extremist progressive (woke) politics alienates mainstream polities. It is particularly toxic for traditionally left-wing parties pursuing culture wars while worsening class wars.
This is also the lesson of the Voice failure in Australia. All the goodwill in the world from corporations, celebrities, and mind-control media cannot win support for minority reforms if the vast majority are getting poorer.
It will backfire angrily, as it should. The business of government is doing the most good for the most people:
“A lot of people couldn’t understand what was going on,” says the long-term Earlwood and Marrickville resident. She spent most of her life working in childcare and retail jobs at Coles and Australia Post, well into her mid-70s, before her husband’s dementia forced her into a full-time carer’s role.
…Reliant on a pension, Wylie’s primary focus is on rising household costs.
“It was all ridiculous when people are finding it hard to survive,” she said about the Voice to parliament referendum held on October 14.
Pollsters, strategists and analysts from both sides of the political divide acknowledge that the concerns of voters like Wylie – who on paper look and sound like once-loyal Labor voters – were widespread and a key factor in the No vote succeeding.
…The economic gloom that pervades Australian households also reinforced a view that Albanese is focused on the wrong priorities, say analysts.
The problem for Albo’s ALP is that the toxic mix of enabling class wars while fighting culture wars is its core strategy for government.
This is Albo’s plan for a generational Labor government. To be a kind of progressive LNP that loves inner-city wankers and corporations but hates workers.
Voice is a relatively minor part of it. The more significant components of multiculturalism, mass immigration and pandering to special interests are the government’s core business.
Consider what Albo has done since taking power:
- allowing an evil gas cartel to ravage the power grid;
- a Jobs and Skills Summit for corporations that delivered no training for locals but opened the floodgates to foreign workers;
- spent scores of millions in speeding up visa processing;
- flew to India and did the worst labour market equalisation deal by any country, ever, levelling Indian qualifications with superior Australian versions.
The practical effect is that the Albanese government is the soverign sponsor of a tiny number of immense corporations with a vested interest in super-charged mass immigration.
The deliberate result has been an unprecedented housing shortage, rental shock, and rising capital values despite the fastest interest rate tightening in history.
All told, this made the Australian inflation shock much worse than it needed to be, and it will, in due course, also crash wage growth.
Workers have been annihilated:
Now consider what Albo should be doing but isn’t lest it upset his corporate mates:
- reform to tackle egregious tax concessions, onerous income taxes versus light capital taxes;
- reform to inject competition and innovation into a grotesquely oligopolistic supply side;
- reform to diversify Australian supply chains from China and restore the industrial base for economic sustainability;
- reform to tackle the worst housing crisis in modern Australian history;
- reform to accelerate decarbonisation, protect the physical environment and secure water;
- reform to boost productivity and lift wages versus profits.
The class war of Albo’s fake left government makes every one of Australia’s most vital socio-economic issues materially worse.
To wit, John Black is a former Labor senator for Queensland:
We saw 36 seats where the No vote was more than 20 per cent above the Coalition 2PP vote in 2022. In some cases, up to 36 per cent above. Of the 36 seats, 29 were held by current ALP MPs in Albanese’s caucus. There are 10 from NSW, nine from Queensland, seven from Western Australia, five from Victoria, four from South Australia and one from the NT – and they’ve just seen the first half of their first term’s work blown apart by the hubris of their leader and his inability to tell his mates he can’t deliver everything he promised.
When we looked at the demographics of these voters, they were led by classic working families (a tradie dad married to a white-collar mum, with a couple of kids and a mortgage) along with digitally disrupted families (a dad working as machine operator or labourer, often in manufacturing, with a white-collar mum and kids), and low- to medium-income families generally with two or three kids on Family Tax A or B, and finally women with a certificate qualification in hospitality.
Unless Albanese can regain the support of these big dollops of Labor voters across so many Labor seats in 2025, he is leading a one-term government. He’s now been told officially by more than 8.5 million Australian voters in all six states who voted No.
Albo is beyond phony. He is an enemy masquerading as a friend.
When the polity realises it, nothing will save Labor.
